Performance for 25 Passing Vehicles – John Reid

A naked body lies beside the side of a desolate highway, close to a road sign, next to the carcass of a kangaroo. 25 cars pass…

I met John Reid, the Australian artist, at a conference in Bavaria in 2001. His ‘paper’ turned from an account of his early work into a live performance of The fishman of SE Australia. The transition between the two halves was disturbingly subtle, and left me, how shall I put it, freaked out.

Just a man talking, and a slide projector showing some photographs of the wilderness, with something in it…

The earlier work (Performance for 25 Passing Vehicles) of his came to mind when I was considering the effect getting into a car has on our relationship with the environment, with people, with wildlife.

That’s it! The difference a plate of glass makes – Reid’s fishman also plays on this, using the surface of the water as a barrier, so we can never quite be sure what lies beneath. I talked with him for an hour, and he still maintained the fishman was real… and I half believed him: he was real in a way!

That’s the thing with the 25 vehicles piece – are we the same as the drivers that sped past? Reid talks about how wildlife/wilderness photographers engage us in voyeurism, and he wants to try to bring us into a closer relationship with the reality of encountering the wild.